Disintegrating Democracy at Work: Labor Unions and the Future of Good Jobs in the Service Economy by Virginia Doellgast (review)

This book is about the politics of restructuring in the call centre industry and “the social costs of market liberalization.” (xi–xii) It traces what happened to call centre jobs in the United States and Germany after the introduction of new technologies and the deregulation of telecommunications markets in the 1990s while focusing “on unions and works councils as important strategic actors that combine different institutionally and organizationally embedded resources to influence management decisions through negotiations and political action.” (19)

Virginia Doellgast casts her research findings as an antidote to the view that call centre jobs in the contemporary political economy must necessarily be bad jobs. (ix) Indeed she found that during the early years of deregulated markets, German telecommunications companies diverged from their American counterparts by “investing in skills and expanding worker discretion” rather than “rationalizing and deskilling their frontline service and sales jobs.” (210) However the divergence in the quality of call sector jobs in the two countries was short lived because, during the decade of the 2000s, telecommunications firms in Germany found ways to avoid the codetermination political structures that had previously forced them to engage in meaningful negotiations with worker representatives. Doellgast’s conclusion “is that strong forms of workplace democracy backed by encompassing collective bargaining are necessary to encourage investment in high-involvement employment systems and to prevent the degradation of job quality in employment settings where managers face strong pressures to reduce labor costs.” (19) With the recent degradation of call centre jobs in Germany, the book ultimately points to Denmark as the best case scenario for call centre workers: the combination of “participation rights, strong local unions, and encompassing bargaining” has resulted in Danish call centres adopting high-involvement employment systems with high average earnings and minimal earnings inequality. (27, 200)

The core of Disintegrating Democracy is two long empirical chapters that take up 126 of the 220 pages. The first studies how and why call centre employment systems changed during a time of “declining prices and increasingly competitive markets.” (54) Four matched pairs of American and German call centres are investigated. The first pair consists of unionized call centres operated directly by established, fixed-line telecommunications firms. The US call centre “relied on a young, high-turnover workforce, gave agents very little working time flexibility or control over scheduling, and designed jobs narrowly with few mechanisms for employee participation in decision marking.” (67) In contrast, the German call centre “continued to rely on an older, more stable workforce, created more broadly skilled universal rep positions, established extensive opportunities for employee participation, and gave agents broad discretion over their schedules and break times.” (67) The better outcomes for workers in the German call centre were because of “strong codetermination rights” held by an elected work council that operated in concert with the union. (71)

Large wireless companies directly operated the call centres in the second matched pair. Both centres were recently unionized and a works council was also in place in the German centre. The patterned differences in employment systems paralleled those of the first matched pair. (75) Different multinational subcontractors operated the call centres in the third matched pair. The workers in the German centre were represented by a works council and covered by a collective agreement but the workers in the American centre had no collective representation. This market segment of the call centre industry is highly competitive and as a result the German works council and union were somewhat limited in the protections they could secure for workers. Finally, subsidiaries of a multinational subcontractor operated the call centres in the fourth matched pair. The parent subcontractor also operated call centres in many other countries, and the US call centre that Doellgast studied was closed in 2005 after work had been shifted to subsidiaries in India and Canada. (112–113) Significantly this multinational subcontractor managed to avoid both works councils and unions...